Read 2026-10-04
coollabsio/coolify: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in coollabsio/coolify's code and history at 8bbab72: its licence, security advisories, releases, review practice, tests, dependencies and operations. Every finding cites the file and line it rests on. The full report also covers the team and asks the questions the code cannot answer.
| Dimension | Rating |
|---|---|
| Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance | strong |
| Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity | strong |
| Product & Engineering Maturity | strong |
| Security & Reliability Posture | adequate |
| Observability & Operations | strong |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
CONTRIBUTING.md:85: The project does not take pull requestsLICENSE: Relicensed: AGPL-3.0 → Apache-2.0 (2022-08-11).github/pull_request_template.md:5: states a policy on AI-generated contributions
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
strongapp/Http/Controllers/Api/ApplicationsController.php is 6,324 lines, 82× this codebase's median file
adequateThe median source file here is 77 lines. 26 files exceed 1,000 lines, the largest being 6,324. Size is not a defect on its own — some problems genuinely live in one place — but these are where merge conflicts, review fatigue and single-owner knowledge concentrate, and they are the first thing that slows an inheriting engineer down.
app/Http/Controllers/Api/ApplicationsController.php:1 — 6,324 lines (82× median) |
app/Jobs/ApplicationDeploymentJob.php:1 — 5,856 lines (76× median) |
bootstrap/helpers/shared.php:1 — 5,588 lines (72× median) |
app/Http/Controllers/Api/DatabasesController.php:1 — 5,156 lines (66× median) |
app/Http/Controllers/Api/ServicesController.php:1 — 3,413 lines (44× median) |
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
strongNo finding.
Product & Engineering Maturity
strongNo finding.
Security & Reliability Posture
adequate14 credential-shaped strings in the tree sit in tests, examples, documentation or local development settings
adequateStrings shaped like credentials appear only where fakes are usual: test fixtures, examples, documentation, placeholders and local stacks. They are almost always fakes. Ask someone to confirm that none of them works anywhere, because a real key in a development file is still a real key. 3 other matchs set aside: expired tokens, licence tokens a vendor verifies with a public key, or placeholder text where a key would go. None grants access to anything.
| 5 cited: GitHub token, where fakes are usual |
2 Dockerfiles run the application as root
adequateNo USER instruction switches away from root, so the process runs with full privileges inside the container. It is a one-line fix and an ordinary expectation, which is why its absence is worth asking about: it usually says more about whether anyone has reviewed the deployment than about this container specifically.
docker/coolify-helper/Dockerfile — runs as root |
docker/testing-host/Dockerfile — runs as root |
3 environment files are committed
adequate.env.dusk.ci, .env.production, other/nightly/.env.production are tracked in git. Environment files are where credentials usually live, and committing one usually means nobody decided how secrets reach the running application. Whatever is in it is in the history for good. Check 05.1 says whether it holds anything credential-shaped.
.env.dusk.ci — committed environment file |
.env.production — committed environment file |
other/nightly/.env.production — committed environment file |
The build runs third-party code it does not pin
adequate7 third-party CI actions are referenced by a tag or branch rather than a commit, so they run whatever that tag points to on the day; 5 steps pipe a download straight into a shell. Tags have been moved to malicious commits in real supply-chain attacks, and a piped script is whatever the server returns that minute. Pinning to a commit is the fix, and it is small.
.github/workflows/claude.yml:34 — action pinned by tag |
.github/workflows/coolify-helper-next.yml:37 — action pinned by tag |
docker/coolify-helper/Dockerfile:54 — download piped into a shell |
14 workload settings give a container the host
adequate14 places in the deployment configuration run a container privileged or in the host's network, process or IPC namespace. A compromise of that container is a compromise of the machine, and most acquirers' security reviews block it. Node agents (network, storage, monitoring) are excluded.
templates/compose/beszel-agent.yaml:10 — privileged or host namespace |
templates/compose/beszel.yaml:28 — privileged or host namespace |
templates/compose/cloudflare-ddns.yaml:10 — privileged or host namespace |
Relicensed: AGPL-3.0 → Apache-2.0 (2022-08-11)
adequateThe root licence changed 1 time(s). Code taken under earlier terms stays under them; check which terms any fork or customer relied on.
77 advisories against this project in the last 24 months, 52 high or critical
adequateThe newest was published on 2026-09-27. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. Whether 32 of them are fixed in the code you ship could not be told from this history: its version is only known to be at least 4.3.23. Answer lives in: the release you run, set against each fixed version. The record is incomplete: NVD: 2 records name coolify with nothing tying them to this repository (CVE-2026-12815, CVE-2026-15507).
| 2026-09-27: CVE-2026-100744 (moderate): A flaw has been found in coollabsio Coolify up to 4.1.2. The affected element is an unknown function of the file app/Http/Middleware/CanUpdateResource.php of th |
| 2026-09-27: CVE-2026-100746 (moderate): A vulnerability was found in coollabsio Coolify up to 4.1.0. This affects the function Github::redirect of the file /webhooks/source/github/redirect of the comp |
| 2026-09-05: CVE-2026-86117 (critical): Coolify through 4.3.17 contains an authentication bypass vulnerability in the OAuth callback handler that signs users into existing accounts based solely on ema |
| 2026-09-02: CVE-2026-84694 (high): Coolify before 4.2.0 fails to properly escape environment variable key names in Docker commands executed over SSH on managed servers. Authenticated attackers ca |
| 2026-07-02: GHSA-chg4-63hm-xv9x (high), fixed in 4.0.0-beta.474: Authenticated RCE via SHELL_SAFE_COMMAND_PATTERN regression → host root |
Observability & Operations
strongNo error reporter is wired in
adequateNothing in the service initialises an error reporter (Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, Honeybadger or an APM agent). An exception in production reaches a person only if someone is reading the logs, which usually means a customer reports it first.
| no error reporter initialised |
3 of 11 deployed images carry no version, or `latest`
adequate3 images in the deployment configuration are named without a version or as `latest`. A redeploy can change the software without a commit, a rollback has nothing to roll back to, and nobody can say from the repository what is running.
docker-compose-maxio.dev.yml:103 — image without a version |
other/nightly/docker-compose.windows.yml:4 — image without a version |
other/nightly/docker-compose.windows.yml:11 — image without a version |
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
Read more, or read your own
The full report on coollabsio/coolify: every dimension, the questions for the room, and the audit log.
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